Sebastián González

Uber founder Travis Kalanick just inverted the entire automation panic. Everyone assumes AI eliminates human value. The physics say the opposite. Kalanick: “Let’s say the entire world, everything in our world, was automated except for plumbers. You had machines making buildings. You would basically have like a thousand buildings a day.” The algorithm can design a skyscraper in a millisecond. It cannot connect the pipes. When compute violently accelerates the speed of construction, the unautomated human becomes the ultimate bottleneck. And the bottleneck captures all the margin. Kalanick: “How valuable would those plumbers be? Extremely valuable. Those guys, each and every plumber would be like LeBron. Why? Because plumbing is the long pole in the tent to progress.” If the machine needs a human to finalize physical execution, that human doesn’t get replaced. Their economic value goes exponential. Kalanick: “You got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers.” The market thinks automation drives human wages to zero. The physics dictate it drives the bottleneck’s wages to infinity. The next decade doesn’t belong to whoever out-computes the machine. It belongs to whoever stands at the exact point where the digital engine meets the physical world. Kalanick: “If we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere, if it was a thousand to one, you still probably have, I don’t know, 20 million jobs, 50 million jobs.” The panic over job destruction assumes a static volume of output. When output goes infinite, the system demands more human oversight. Not less. Waymo doesn’t delete the human. It shifts them from driver of one vehicle to director of a thousand. Kalanick: “Until we get super AGI, humans are valuable and they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress.” You are no longer the engine. You are the grid.

Software was eaten by AI.

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

Larry Page: Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it's very hard to fail completely. That's the thing that people don't get.

While cross-country skiing this morning, Dr. Karp decided to launch a new program: The Neurodivergent Fellowship. If you find yourself relating to him in this video — unable to sit still, or thinking faster than you can speak — we encourage you to apply. The final round of interviews will be conducted by Dr. Karp personally. Application link coming soon. Thank you and good luck.

Build this one life habit: final food 4 hr before sleep. Never ever break it. It will change your life, I promise.

It's ironic that a lot of smart people fail to live fulfilling lives precisely because they think too much; and they think too much because they lack two things: (1) the faith to believe in their own growth and (2) the courage to act when they feel scared.

writing code was never the hard part if it were, all developers would have 100k mrr apps